OpenMarket – September 9, 2015
A few months ago, Gartner revealed a list of Golden Rules that CIOs should consider when thinking about how to maximize the business value of mobility for customer engagement. The six rules (below) provide some reasonable guidance. Since OpenMarket works with enterprise CIOs on an almost daily basis, I thought I’d provide my own insight and commentary that might provide additional guidance in navigating some of the challenges with mobile.
Gartner’s Golden Rules for Mobile
- Be tactical and pragmatic, seek advantage not perfection
- Use ideas such as bimodal IT and pace layering to enable mobile agility and innovation
- Invest in ideation, many of the best mobile opportunities are undiscovered
- Identify and master the mobile capabilities and technologies that will be strategic to your business
- Participate in the business discussion on mobility, be seen as a mobile visionary
- Stop trying to control the things that can’t be controlled – such as endpoint devices and consumer app stores
Be tactical and pragmatic, seek advantage not perfection – The translation here is get started! You don’t need a holistic mobile plan to start your first project and begin seeing value. In fact, the sooner you start, the sooner others in your organization will see the success and want to get involved with their own projects.
Use ideas such as bimodal IT and pace layering to enable mobile agility and innovation – The biggest challenge with IT is constrained resource and too many high priorities. When considering mobile projects, give extra consideration to how you’ll be supported in deploying your solution – you’ll never have as many resources as you’d wish and working with an experienced vendor can get you there more quickly.
Invest in ideation, many of the best mobile opportunities are undiscovered – Great advice! Invite business leaders from other functional departments into brainstorming and planning conversations. Get their ideas on improving customer engagement. Most customer journeys are complex, and there are many opportunities and touch points to improve and add value to.
Identify and master the mobile capabilities and technologies that will be strategic to your business – This makes sense but won’t apply to 90% of businesses out there. In most cases you are better off focusing on the technologies that are core to your business and look for a vendor (domain experts) to help you apply mobile to your ‘secret sauce’. Once you gain some competency you may find some technology that does need to be brought in house.
Participate in the business discussion on mobility, be seen as a mobile visionary – In many organizations, different business leaders are driving their own mobile agenda as needs arise. This leads to a fragmented approach and increased IT spending. As the CIO, you need to get in ahead of this and facilitate these discussions across the organization (see rule #3).
Stop trying to control the things that can’t be controlled – such as endpoint devices and consumer app stores – This is a big one; mobile isn’t a one-trick-pony and just having a mobile app isn’t a ‘mobile strategy’. Think about your business goals and the goals of your customer, then think about the channels you have to reach them. Mobile Apps, Mobile Messaging (SMS), and Mobile Web are all different tools for different goals.
If you have any comments or questions please don’t hesitate to reach out, I’d love to hear your perspective.